Friday, May 21, 2010

The Curious Mr. Robinson

In the last day or so, there has been much ink spilled in the U.S. media over one Rand Paul. Son of Ron Paul, Rand is now GOP candidate for the state of Kentucky's open Senate seat in the upcoming mid-term elections, having ousted the "establishment" candidate in this week's Republican Primaries. On the very heels of his victory, however, Mr. Paul suddenly found himself on the wrong end of some tough questions about whether private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against blacks.

Hey presto, he went from a rising star within the "tea party" movement, and therefore within the GOP, to a ball & chain in less than 48 hours.

Now, presumably, the MSM will go looking for other unexploded bombs in the GOP's "tea party" insurgency.

Which brings us to Arthur Robinson, winner of the Republican Congressional Nomination in Oregon District 4. Arthur Robinson is a climate change skeptic. In fact, he is one of the people behind The Oregon Petition , a petition opposing the Kyoto Protocol and similar efforts to mitigate climate change. I've written about Mr. Robinson, his petition, and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which Mr. Robinson founded back in 1980, here.

As part of his work at the Institute, Mr. Robinson has, since 1993, served as editor of the Access To Energy newsletter. Happily, the institute has archived this publication back to 1973. Lets troll through some of the back issues, and see what we find, shall we?

Given the recent BP spill off Louisiana, I thought it would be interesting to learn Mr. Robinson's views on off-shore drilling. These were not hard to discover:

This is just a sample from Mr. Robinson's extensive writings on the Oregon Institute website and elsewhere. I've barely touched on his AGW skepticism, or the many, many articles he's written on Hormesis (which is the the idea that a little bit of radiation is actually good for you).

Hopefully, though, it is enough to give a taste of the man's philosophy

9 comments:

And as oddball as Mr. Robinson is, he is correct concerning the source of most oil spills.

According the the NAS Report Oil In the Seas III, nearly 85 percent of the oil that enters North American ocean waters each year is a result of human activities and comes from land-based runoff, polluted rivers, airplanes, small boats, etc..

Radiation hormeosis is not too oddball an idea. For instance, production of Vitamin D needs uvb radiation. But even continual low doses of UVB may increase the risk of skin Cancer. So at some point there is a trade off.

The reason why radiation Hormeosis is controversial is primarily because of the back and forth between nuclear energy advocates and detractors, especially about the health consequences of disasters like Chernobyl, or minor ones like leaks of tritiated water.

Unfortunately, because it is politically charged, this is a subject attracts cranks. But not everything believed by a crank is necessarily wrong.

I conjecture that this was really stirred up by Frederick Seitz & GMI folks, with most of the text provided by Baliunas and Soon, but with the OISM folks on as a front, to keep it away from GMI. Their ally Fred Singer already had a long history of doing such petitions, and this was synchronous with the 1998 "GCSCT" effort, in which GMI & Signer were certainly involved.

Anyway, you might review the history versus that and see if it fits.

In any case, I think it is *great* that Robinson is running for Congress! I'm not sure he realizes the levels of exposure that may ensue ... and OR-04 could be a rather tough district for him to win in.